EILEEN SIMPSON AND BEN WHITE (OPEN MUSIC ARCHIVE) This text responds to Everything I Have Is Yours (2019) by Eileen Simpson and Ben White (Open Music Archive), an artists’ film that takes as a starting point records produced during the first decade of the UK pop charts – 1952 to 1962 – and experimentally repurposes them in an on-going exploration of the limits of sampling and the possibilities of live collaboration.

Originally published in Everything I Have Is Yours: The Commissioned Texts PAUL MORLEY

T HE S T E EN EN L I have some questions I want to ask Eileen Simpson TIM T TI and Ben White, two Manchester-born artists working E TH with music who engage with network practices and IS IN information technology. Both were working individually in 2005 on similar projects connected with a search for meaning and new expertise through sampling found sounds and footage, and both began to experience copyright problems with the material they wanted to use. The arrival of YouTube and a proliferation of new broadcast networks had made a torrent of raw material increasingly available, but any investigative, creative use, however niche, personal or disguised, was limited by increasingly vigilant and restrictive legal frameworks. Some material, they noted with interest, had slipped through the cracks — if it was written by anyone who had died more than seventy years ago, or recorded more than fifty years ago, which tends to be from the rough-and-ready, strangely enchanting beginnings of the modern recording industry. The copyright of a composition and the product it appeared on was originally arranged around an estimated lifetime, so that eventually it would run out, and creative works, as a whole or in parts, could be released into the public domain. What Writer and broadcaster Paul Morley grew up in , and wrote for the NME from 1977 to 1983. He was a happens then? Could music that breaks free ever founder member of and the showrunner of the ZTT Record label, featuring Frankie Goes to make a noise again, or just become part of a Hollywood. He has written books about suicide, , ‘lost list’ — an orderly, mute record of records the Bakerloo line, the history of pop and the North of England. He collaborated with on her memoir that don’t exist any more? I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, and wrote a best selling biography of David Bowie in 2016, The Age of Bowie. His biography of Tony Wilson will be published in 2020.

21 22 Simpson and White then began working together independent space for teenagers to occupy, to and formed Open Music Archive, combining with find themselves, and for better or worse begin a variety of collaborators to develop new ways of to take control of their own destinies and locate taking and retaking unrestricted material from their own events, opportunities and places of the past and radically reorganising its essence. worship. The charts as a system of estimation and “Not,” they say, “to be obsessed with the past self-serving commercial bias were discriminatory or with history, but to consider the future of in all sorts of ways, but left room for glitches, and this stuff.” the introduction of surprises, oddities and even actual signs of disruption. Around the exhilarating Everything I Have Is Yours is their latest exercise in idea of the universally agreed-upon hit song and randomly yet purposefully taking creative work the unquestionable, fascinating existence of a that has become ‘derelict’, outside the commercial definitive chart topper, secret and spectacular concerns of any company or owner, and re-imagining teenage life uncoiled. it under a new set of conditions from a completely new, unsentimental point of view. The project is — also a document that contains traces of a unique local history, in this case Manchester pop music, The song ‘Everything I Have Is Yours’ was written from a point where it all began, in and around the by Burton Lane, who is credited with discovering very early pop charts, listened to by music fans Judy Garland, and lyricist Harold Adamson, who born during or just after the Second World War who wrote the theme song for I Love Lucy. It was became the first set of modern teenagers. The first first sung in the 1933 film Dancing Lady, and then UK pop charts based on record sales rather than pre-rock and roll superstar Eddie Fisher’s version sheet music were compiled by the New Musical reached Number 8 in the brand-new UK charts Express pop magazine. Copying the exciting looking in November, 1952. It perhaps needed just a copy chart system of American Billboard, its enthusiastic or two in each of the twenty shops surveyed to editor Percy Dickins rang around twenty record rise so high. shops for a list of their best-selling songs. Initially, it was an awkwardly shaped, non-decimal Top “This is a song of the 1950s even though it was 12, but the addictive idea of a Number One song, written twenty years before. It comes from cinema, a chart of favourites creating glorious hits and where hits of the day often came from before shadowy misses, changed more than just music the charts made things official, and it is itself and the industry. repurposed in different films, and by being sung by the likes of Billie Holiday in 1952 and Shirley Before the pop charts, and the accelerated Bassey in 1962. It was a way of passing knowledge, routine of new sounds and constant, competitive experience and history from one generation to changes in style and tempo, there was a lack of another, a tradition we continue.

23 24 It’s typical of the songs we deal with, which tend cultivated modern value, would take a lot longer to be folk, jazz, blues, light opera, romantic ballads, to enter the public domain, unlike that unfixed, pop before pop was really pop, because parts of unclassifiable, primitively recorded stuff from them are out of copyright. If it’s freely available, before pop, and before teenagers, not seen as we’ll use it — even if it is not necessarily a great being sexy or culturally compelling enough for piece of music, there is always a sound, an echo, the music industry to care about. a breath we can use. We’ve found there is a real uncharted, outsider weirdness to the period. Up Eileen and Ben reconfigure this prehistoric 1952-62 to a point, between the 1930s and the early 1960s, period by following it through to what they perceive this song keeps reappearing in popular culture. It to be a logical, local and stylistic conclusion. They travels by film, on radio, on record, by cover version. invite some of those original teenagers, sixty, As one of many sources in this piece, it has a new seventy years later, to express in their own private, life and reappears again, not as a faithful cover serene code what pop music meant to them — those version but as part of an artwork. It can still exist that saw and heard the changes from innocent, as a story that is passed forward.” near word of mouth beginnings to complex algorithmically-driven network aftermath, from — characterful local record shops to despotic apps, from screaming to streaming. Simpson and White take this coming into being of teenage space, this special birth of pop, to be — between 1952 and 1962, from the rudimentary beginning of an official best-selling charts to just “Our work is not intended to be nostalgic. In fact, before the time the charts were dominated by precisely the opposite. It’s a constant worry that the Beatles et al. Coincidentally or not, as the it might be taken that way, just more fetishising Beatles began, keenly mopping up influences from of vinyl, but we don’t approach the past with kinetic Northern music hall and pre-chart music a sense of yearning for a supposed better time. to early American rock’n’roll, pop was sonically Nostalgia can be a kind of poison, an emotionalising and structurally revolutionised by the electronic of history, which we are definitely seeing in our divisions and multiplications of multi-track tape politics at the moment, a fearful return to some recording, its progressively more sophisticated illusional golden age that never was. We are not delights aggressively co-opted by increasingly interested in preserving the past and simply formalised commercial interests. These interests recreating it, but in attempting to recuperate the would lead to a campaign to rewrite the laws of potential of its collective energy inside a radically copyright, so that modern pop, with all its carefully different setting. A lot of the music we work with

25 26 was originally made with an energy and exuberance attractive but emptied poses, riffs and rhymes. that has got lost over time, and we want to inherit The grip that the charts once had on the mainstream that and extend its range, not lock it inside its has collapsed, the original concept of the trend- settled place in time.” chasing teenager Insta-distorted. But there is a way that the central rituals, private memories and — mysterious reasoning of the past can be renovated and revitalised as something new and spiritually It’s the remnants, and the echoes, resonating through useful. Everything I Have Is Yours is a signpost, time, like a folk song bouncing through generations, a blueprint, a proposal of how past music, dated its purpose changing, of a story that contains sound, outmoded processes, dismantled ideas, fascinated enthusiasm for the togetherness of music faded energies can be re-issued and re-generated that led to all sorts of Manchester groups, scenes, in a contemporary context without it being maudlin, clubs, movements, fashions, characters, designers, or dry and academic. studios, audiences, producers, novelties, fanzines, collaborations and labels . . . music came from the — outside world and was reprocessed by inventive, inquisitive Manchester minds . . . from Freddie and Are your methods influenced by crate digging, the the Dreamers to the Fall . . . Spinning Wheel to hip-hop approach to sampling, to bending the past Rotters . . . Herman’s Hermits to Happy Mondays into new time, rearranging the truth and releasing . . . the Hollies to New Order. . . so eccentrically original new power from old sounds? internationally successful as a music city it led to accumulating and static layers of nostalgia and “We borrow that tactic, but we dig up material that sentimentality; the Hacienda becoming Manchester’s is less culturally desirable than the usual sort of Yellow Submarine, Oasis a cosy, permanently sixties funk and jazz. We have to go behind a self- homesick rock and roll preservation society, pop imposed curtain to find our samples. We’re also music’s equivalent of post-industrial decline, an appropriating tactics from conceptual art where abandonment of innovation. you set up rigorous constraints and rules and then work within them as a kind of thought experiment. With Open Music Archive’s work, this play, this One of those frameworks is legal, which means we ‘everything’, there is a genuine sign of where cannot source what say J. Dilla would have done, the fluid, transcendental, myth-making, non- we work outside the control of the style industry conformist essence of Manchester music has inside this dry, rigid copyright grid that limits our reached — it’s made it into the future, extending sampling options. We share the scheming spirit of an indexed, identifiable past, but without being hip-hop and its own relationship with found sound, swallowed up by it and doomed to repeat its its methods of chopping up loops and samples,

27 28 with the challenging practices of conceptual art — ways of knowing that would not have happened drawing a line and then following it wherever it without the cherished grooves of two-sided goes, pushing a swing until it stops. It’s crate records. “Often record labels don’t even know digging in parallel with avant-garde music — we what they own because it’s from before the 1960s, are aware of both these trajectories, the cerebral before the pop they keep re-packaging. When we and the visceral, and we think one re-invigorates look at 1920s material it’s often from a small label the other. It’s like the writer Kodwo Eshun said — which will have been bought up by a bigger label hip-hop rescued the avant-garde from itself.” and then by an even bigger label and so on, and they don’t know it’s in their catalogue and don’t — have a copy of it. But they own the rights and are happy to protect them once they find out. It’s really Inside this patiently, legally, technologically complicated to work out who owns the rights of constructed set of moments and movements exists some records — some parts are out of copyright, the curious, dissident pop-era Manchester spirit other parts aren’t. It’s a complex bundle of rights. of listeners, fans, musicians, entrepreneurs, So we’re trying to free the sound that we can use dreamers, collectors, interpreters and investigators. from this bundle of rights and ownerships. Voice, It is a kind of drifting landscape, that contains melody and lyrics as a package maybe we can’t the fantasy and reality of Manchester, the tones use, certain instrumental sounds we can, and we and notes of recorded music, the concentration are developing new technologies with which to of the musician, the love of the listener, the do this. We take the recorded moment, the sonic melancholy and decaying ageing process, combined event in the studio, the sound of the room of the with the vintage idea of the charts, all those battles, studio and the microphone and the amp, the beats and snapshots of time and place, which space before and after the sound, the decay of over time has turned into the idea of the playlist, the sound, aiming to create saturated sound that’s the determined ordering and sharing of memories dripping with the moment that it was created.” and moments, of the pop song as an infinitely transferable piece of paradise. The erratically co- — ordinated early market research of the 1950s Top Ten becomes the vertiginous, mega-monitoring Here is a new direction, different sorts of imaginative 21st century millions of songs; the sorting, sharing patterns, undiscovered territory, new thresholds, and rating of music that spills beyond reason. on the cusp of something nameable, that creates an Everything I Have Is Yours marks the end of an era illusion of an impossible genre. A prismatic post- or two, as a tender, enchanting blues, a municipal genre genre influenced by both the glitch techniques memorial, a fractured remembrance of a certain and calculations of laptop cut-and-paste and the way of sensing the world, of taking unprecedented systems, schedules and strategies of a music that control of ever-shifting reality and finding new is somewhere between or around the unforgiving

29 30 edges of total serialism and the more explicitly uncovering, a modification, is made of music but romantic minimalist response. It is hip-hop ghosted is not necessarily simply a piece of music: it is by Morton Feldman. Musique concrète dreamt by about music, a series of images about its value, Doris Day. Alvin Lucier interrupted by Madlib. Lee meaning and mystery, about how it is owned Scratch Perry times Sol Lewitt. The Beverley Sisters and unowned, known and unknown, lost and watched by Jean-Luc Godard. Delia Derbyshire found. Forever and near ever. orbiting Flying Lotus. Vini Reilly slow dancing with Slauson Malone. None of that, at least outside of my — own forged-in-Manchester pop critic imagination, because this event exists outside of music, even “The beginnings of the charts for us feels like an as it revels in it, music as a technological revelation embryonic form of today’s big data analysis, the and a magical communication, as an endlessly algorithms of Spotify. You play something and it malleable artistic material. is instantly analysed, and it suggests another song it calculates you will like, and another song, — and this can go on forever. Music becomes this constant stream of data which produces more “It seems to us that once the bits of sound, the data and so on. songs themselves we’ve worked with for projects, and have been released into the public domain If anyone is still interested in the charts like the they should remain public domain . . . we’re old days, Shazam claim to be able to predict building on something that exists because it is the Number One a month or so ahead, because free with the intention of keeping it free. The work they calculate what people are currently liking we do is about the distribution and circulation and they can anticipate the immediate popular of things more than it is about authorship. It’s result of that. Shazam has this precog way of not about us doing a mashup and re-authoring knowing what will happen; taste predicts taste, something in quite a straightforward way, sound the ultimate synthetic refinement of what the for sound’s sake. It’s more about exploring what charts were always doing but without the unexpected happens when these sounds from this period interruptions, the left field shifts in fashion driven begin to circulate, mutate and change in relation by underground urges. Streaming sites, the new to a different musical and social history once technology of music distribution, is the latest they become free.” stage of the charts, but more explicitly about auditing behaviour, curating attention and creating — formula. Our work recently has worked with music, but it’s got wider social and political This version of Everything I Have Is Yours, not applications — how people’s likes and wants and so much a cover version of the original as an

31 32 desires and opinions are created and controlled Durutti Column. He was playing jazz in the 1950s, by this relentless flow of data.” drumming in Moss Side clubs in the 1960s, with Alberto y Los Trios Paranoias in the 1970s. Working This combining of selective hip-hop appropriation with us, improvising around loops, working out with classically avant-garde repurposing and pulse, he took the abstraction in his stride. Others reframing of objects and objectives is an actual weren’t so sure what we were doing. For some it sign of a change in music that resists the nefarious was the first time they had ever contributed to pull of the vinyl age, even as it rummages around the composition of something like this, but they inside it, looking for traces, for tantalising shifts loved the experience.” in emphasis, for wonder, for what remains of the most distant, dusty recorded songs, the — assertion of the dead — whether fashions, energy or musicians — into the sphere of the living. It is played by a new kind of ensemble, a variation on the idea of a group, on the traditional form of — a band, something that cannot really be repeated. It’s the reforming of a group that never existed in “We were keen to work with people from around the first place, one that has no name.1 Taking the Manchester who were musically active between form of a secretive portrait of the creative process 1952 and 1962, so that it’s got a kind of specific shifting between ghostly fly-on-the-wall and context because our projects are always site circular installation it is made up by combining a specific, whether that’s with a particular archive, variety of discarded out-of-copyright sources and particular people or a particular history of public domain samples, and these captured takes, something. We wanted to work with people who notes, rhythms, hints and signals then inspire were active as musicians in that period, whether musicians and singers with their own local stories, that was amateur musicians, enthusiasts, or personal taste and various levels of proficiency to pros or semi-pros. We’ve got a whole range of create their own responses, their own free-flowing people in the film from people who, say, played sonic genome, finding treasure and themselves in bands at school but didn’t really become between jamming and dreaming. professional musicians, and don’t play any more; someone that released a record in the early sixties, — still collects guitars but doesn’t play much any more; original members of pop groups like The “I think a lot of people we asked turned up expecting Dollies. And then people like Bruce Mitchell, a to sit down and tell us their anecdotes of the fifties, well-connected professional drummer who did that it would be a talking head film, that we were lots of things, still does, and is well known for making a documentary simply reminiscing about

33 34 that period, because this what people expect – working something out. Someone thinking. What that’s the usual sort of thing. But of course no one is happening here? What happens next?” speaks in the film. Their answers, their anecdotes, Eileen and Ben/Open Music Archive, pursuing pure are musical. The anecdotes are there, but they’re research into sound within a tradition that not spoken. They’re sort of in the performance, goes back to the experimental laboratories and in how they react to the situation and the process.” obscured histories of Milton Babbitt and Karlheinz Stockhausen, are not the composers, conductors, — leaders, producers, engineers, impresarios, writers, consultants, musicologists, directors, negotiators, Everything I Have Is Yours is about the transformation moderators, code crackers, beat hunters, curators, of experience, presented as a discreet kind of editors, community builders, project leaders or abstract, non-verbal documentary which seeks to auteurs, depending on an army of assistants to explore the fiction that can be found behind reality complete their work, but something else, an and the reality that exists behind fiction. occupation, an assignment, an enlightened form of artistic modelling yet to be named that links — human instinct with algorithmic intelligence, remembrance with technology.2 “We’re not making an album or a track. There are fragmented elements that get assembled into — something that resembles a track that might be in the process of being recorded in the studio “I think the last thing we wanted is any sense of or rehearsed into something, so it’s hovering it being like, putting the band back together. But between different states, not least between song it becomes something you didn’t see coming as and sound. It will have an arc, yes, the sound you were working on the piece itself, discovering builds and drops, hints at the existence of the what it is by doing it. Roy, one of the guitarists, idea of song. There are moments where it collects he described it as like putting a family together. into something more obviously musical, so you We were meeting every week. Making something. could walk into the room at a certain point and Learning new things. Finding out about each other. think, oh, there’s a band playing. You might walk in And when it was over he’s like: ‘What am I going to at another time and see Bruce trying something do now? It’s all finished!’ I suppose it’s one of the out on the drums because he’s reacting to the problems of a project where you engage people like loop the first time that it’s played to him through this to work collectively for a short while, to get his headphones, and something forms from used to a new scene, to become involved in a new that, and then it falls apart again, and becomes activity. What happens when it’s all finished?” something else. It’s not a band. It’s someone

35 36 Endnotes —

1 · The collection of strangers performing Everything in no particular time and space, as imaginary avant-beat combo, as obscure temporary supergroup, could be called The Thoughts.

2 · The role of Eileen and Ben as post-modern fixers, aesthetic planners, knowledge seekers and copyright wranglers, as reserved, undercover combination of record producers, conceptual artists, artistic researchers, data collectors and diligent archivists could be defined as ‘interagents’. If there was some sort of record of their work — released on an imaginary new format more suited to the reality-rearranging 21st century than quaint vinyl — it would be called Something Always Remains.

37 38 Commissioners / Lighting Technician The artists would like to thank Executive Producers Simeon Ogden · The Stoller Hall the following individuals and Film and Video Umbrella organisations who supported University of Salford Art Collection Sound Engineer the production of the film: Castlefield Gallery Lee Aston Brendan Williams  Steven Bode, Susanna Chisholm and all at FVU Lindsay Taylor, and all at University of Salford Producer Helen Wewiora, and all at Castlefield Gallery Laura Shacham Stylist Ianthe Wright University of Salford, TV Studios Queen Mary University, London Assistant Producer Manchester School of Art Polly Wright On-set stylist at Manchester Metropolitan University

Lily Austin John Ashbrook Casting Producer Lou Hall Big Fish Rentals Claire Bleasdale Astrid Bin Richard Bradbury Hair & Make-Up Linda Brogan A Film by Additional Casting Katy Brody Melissa Burnand · Jam Street Cafe Open Music Archive Simon Chaplin Eileen Simpson & Ben White Barry Daykin Laura Shacham Production Assistants Mel Dean (Open Music Archive) Polly Wright Adam Douglas Drop City Lighting Hannah Jupe Fac365 Gillian Fox Director of Photography Daniel Newport — Timothy France Jamie Kennerley Joseph Preston Anthony Gannon · All+ Chas Baker – vocals Calypso George Norman Beaker – guitar Bob Gill 1st Assistant Camera Sound Mix Jonathan Green · Unity Radio Max Beesley – drums / Focus Puller Lee Aston Josh King Roger Browne – piano Sean Beasley Brendan Williams John Mepham Tamsin Middleton Stewart Butler – baritone sax Low Four Studios Alex Morley 2nd Assistant Camera Niamos Arts Centre Tony Chess – drums and djembe Josh Haigherty Additional VFX NoDrama Maureen Donahue – vocals Colin O’Toole Matt Wilmshurst Dan Parrott and Brendan Williams · Low Four Mike Farmer – tenor sax Additional Cinematography Studio Peter Fox – guitar and vocals Jonas Mortensen Colourist Nancy Porter Derek Quinn Bo Lee – bass guitar Max Ferguson-Hook · Pauline Renshaw Jill MacDonald – vocals Grip Time Based Arts Trevor Roots Rick Griffiths Sean Simpson Jean Martin – vocals Teresa Simpson Jon Head Paul Medina – double bass and trombone Denise Southworth · Legacy FM Liz Starkie Bruce Mitchell – drums The Stoller Hall Gaffer Richard Piggott – guitar Ashley Tidball Mark Rickitts Helen White CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION- Roy Rigby – guitar Dan Tunstall SHAREALIKE 4.0 INTERNATIONAL Matthew White

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